Let me tell you, when what you teach and develop every day has the title "Innovation" attached to it, you reach a point where you tire of hearing about Apple. Without question, nearly everyone believes the equation Apple = Innovation is a fundamental truth--akin to the second law of thermodynamics, Boyle's Law, or Moore's Law. But ask these same people if they understand exactly how Apple comes up with their ideas and what approach the company uses to develop blockbuster products--whether it is a fluky phenomenon or based on a repeatable set of governing principles--and you mostly get a dumbfounded stare. This response is what frustrates me most, because people worship what they don't understand.

"The early ipods had annoying syncing issues due to their weird DRM limits and the AAC format"

Were you born in 2003? "The early iPods" worked only on a Mac over firewire (infinitely faster and more reliable than USB1) and there was no iTunes store, no DRM, no AAC.

“People would just keep all their music on the ipod and never bother with burning cds or streaming from the computer.”

Uh, no. The iPod synced as soon as you plugged it in. It was the only player, anywhere, that did this. It required zero effort to get the content on it, and keep it up to date.

"With other players you could just keep your mp3s in "My Music" and the software would keep it synced."

No, manual copy and paste was usually the only option, and if syncing software was provided it was horribly unwieldy. Microsoft only added syncing to Windows Media Player *after* iTunes had shown the way.

I owned a number of MP3 players before the iPod came out, even wrote my own media player software and I know quite well what the iPod did that the rest of the market didn’t. You’re trolling based on the already established market in 2003-2005, not 1996-2002.